Shayne Looper: Humanity is both the trick’ and the treat’

Sunday

It’s time once again for phantasms, ghosts and spirits to make their appearance. And monsters and devils, too. And where should we look for them?

It’s time once again for phantasms, ghosts and spirits to make their appearance. And monsters and devils, too. And where should we look for them?

Someplace you might never guess: in the Bible.

The Bible mentions all kinds of frightening creatures: sea and land monsters, like the leviathan and the behemoth; witches and necromancers; and demons and demoniacs, including at least one who haunted a graveyard and possessed extraordinary strength.

Then there are the terrifyingly good creatures that appear in the pages of the Bible. We lump them all together as “angels,” but the Bible does not. There are cherubs and seraphs and something the writer of the Revelation refers to as “living creatures.” They are neither human nor angelic, and they populate heaven.

There is a scene in one of the "Star Wars" movies that finds Han Solo and his pal Chewbacca in a galactic bar. They are surrounded by bizarre creatures: some have horns, some have noses on top of their heads, and others have eyes on the ends of trunk-like noses. The comic element in the scene depends on our being shocked by the “alien-ness” of the creatures while the hero takes them completely for granted.

I expect that all those who reach heaven will experience something of that “alien-ness.”

They will find themselves surrounded by weird fellow-creatures. Take, for example, the cherub. When we think of a cherub, we think of a cute, chubby winged child, who shoots “love arrows” at young men and women. But the Bible represents them rather differently. The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel described cherubs as having four faces, four sides and four wings. Were we to actually see one, we’d probably faint.

The Bible also contains “ghost stories.” It was a dark and stormy night when Jesus’ disciples were crossing Lake Galilee and saw something moving along the surface of the water. “‘It’s a ghost,’ they said, and cried out in fear.” But St. Matthew writes that it was not a ghost they saw, but Jesus. On a later occasion, the same people jumped to the same conclusion. “They were startled and frightened,” writes the evangelist, “thinking they saw a ghost.”

These men had active imaginations. More than once they thought they saw a ghost, and more than once they were mistaken. Nowhere does the Bible encourage readers to fear ghosts. While it sometimes reports such fears, it never validates them.

The scariest creature in the Bible may well be the ... human. He is neither merely evil, like the devil, nor purely good, like an angel, but his potential for both is beyond comprehension. He is, as Hamlet put it, “The beauty of the world,” but he can just as truly be its terror. The greatness of humanity, according to older thinkers, had to be hidden from us because a true understanding of our nature and destiny would be a burden too heavy to bear.

In a sermon C. S. Lewis once preached, he said: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”

Humanity is both the trick and the treat, blood-thirsty demon and beautiful princess. Isn’t it true? How else can one explain a Mother Teresa and a Bernie Madoff, a Desmond Tutu and an Adolf Hitler? For that matter, how else can one explain me — or you?

Yet even with all its scary creatures, the Bible is not a horror story. It’s a love story. It tells of a Creator who loves his (sometimes monstrous) creation so much that he comes to save them through his Son. Because of him, his people will be the treat, but never the trick.

Shayne Looper is the pastor at the Lockwood Community Church in Michigan. He can be reached at salooper@dmcibb.net.

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